Finding unique values using the LINQ Distinct operator

November 18, 2016 Leave a comment

Extracting unique values from a sequence of objects in LINQ is very easy using the Distinct operator. It comes in two versions: one with a default equality comparer and another which lets you provide a custom comparer.

We’ll use the following collection for the first demo:

string[] bands = { "ACDC", "Queen", "Aerosmith", "Iron Maiden", "Megadeth", "Metallica", "Cream", "Oasis", "Abba", "Blur", "Chic", "Eurythmics", "Genesis", "INXS", "Midnight Oil", "Kent", "Madness", "Manic Street Preachers"
, "Noir Desir", "The Offspring", "Pink Floyd", "Rammstein", "Red Hot Chili Peppers", "Tears for Fears"
, "Deep Purple", "KISS"};

These are all unique values so let’s create some duplicates:

IEnumerable<string> bandsDuplicated = bands.Concat(bands);

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An overview of digital signatures in .NET

November 17, 2016 Leave a comment

Introduction

A digital signature in software has about the same role as a real signature on a document. It proves that a certain person has signed the document thereby authenticating it. A signature increases security around a document for both parties involved, i.e. the one who signed the document – the signee – and the one that uses the document afterwards. The one who signed can claim that the document belongs to them, i.e. it originates from them and cannot be used by another person. If you sign a bank loan request then you should receive the loan and not someone else. Also, the party that takes the document for further processing can be sure that it really originates from the person who signed it. The signee cannot claim that the signature belongs to some other person and they have nothing to do with the document. This latter is called non-repudiation. The signee cannot deny that the document originates from him or her.

Digital signatures in software are used to enhance messaging security. The receiver must be able to know for sure that the message originated with one specific sender and that the sender cannot claim that it was someone else who sent the message. While it is quite possible to copy someone’s signature on a paper document it is much harder to forge a strong digital signature.

In this post we’ll review how digital signatures are implemented in .NET

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Using the StringComparer class for string equality with C# .NET

November 16, 2016 Leave a comment

In this post we saw how to use the generic IEqualityComparer of T interface to indicate equality for our custom types. If you need a similar comparer for strings then there’s a ready-made static class called StringComparer which can construct string comparers for you.

The StringComparer class provides comparers for the common string comparison scenarios: ordinal, locale specific and invariant culture comparisons. This is a good MSDN article on the differences between these.

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Mixing asymmetric and symmetric encryption with HMAC hash verification .NET

November 15, 2016 2 Comments

Introduction

In this post we looked at how to combine symmetric and asymmetric encryption in the same project to increase messaging security. Symmetric encrypt is quick but has the problem of distributing the public key. Asymmetric encryption solves the public key distribution issue but is in turn a lot slower. We can combine the two techniques where a one-time symmetric public key, also called a session key, is encrypted with the asymmetric public key so that it can be decrypted by the receiver who has access to the asymmetric private key.

The solution is OK so far, it is very difficult to find the right keys involved. Still we can do better and add some message verification. We want to be sure that the message hasn’t been tampered with on its way to us. The sender can hash the encrypted message and send it along with the other necessary properties to the receiver. The receiver can compute the hash on their side and verify whether the two are equal. We looked at a couple of hashing techniques in this post but those do not involve any cryptographic key. That means that an attacker can change the message, recalculate the hash and attach it to the message. The password-salted hash algorithm HMAC sounds like a better option. We looked at HMACs in .NET in this post and we’ll reuse what we learnt there.

The goal of this post is to build upon the mixed encryption demo solution we built previously and add HMAC hashing to the picture.

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An overview of grouping collections with LINQ in .NET

November 14, 2016 Leave a comment

Introduction

The LINQ GroupBy operator is one of the most powerful ones among all LINQ operators. It helps us group elements in a collection in various ways and lets us control the element and result selection process. However, with its many overloads and Func parameters the GroupBy operator can be a bit difficult to understand at first. At least it is more complex than say the Min() and Max() LINQ operators.

This post will go through the GroupBy operator and many of its overloads with a number of examples.

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Join custom objects into a concatenated string in .NET C#

November 11, 2016 Leave a comment

Say you have the following Customer object with an overridden ToString method:

public class Customer
{
	public int Id { get; set; }
	public string Name { get; set; }
	public string City { get; set; }

	public override string ToString()
	{
		return string.Format("Id: {0}, name: {1}, city: {2}", Id, Name, City);
	}
}

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Checking for arithmetic overflow in C# .NET

November 10, 2016 Leave a comment

As you know primitive numeric types in C# – and other modern programming languages – have maximum and minimum values that can be stored in memory. If you’re trying to store a larger number in the variable then you’ll get an overflow with unexpected results.

Let’s see an example with the “byte” type. It is actually not one of the primitive types, like int or long, but simply a keyword for an integral type to store the numbers 0-255. Why 255? 1 byte consists of 8 bits and 8 bits in the computer’s memory allows us to store 255 as the highest number. 255 in binary is all 1’s for all 8 bits:

11111111

What happens if we add 1 to that? On paper we can easily solve it by some basic binary maths:

11111111
+ 00000001
===========
100000000

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Keyword function arguments in C#

November 9, 2016 Leave a comment

In this post we’ll quickly go through positional vs. keyword function arguments in C#.

Say you have the following function:

public string GetContent(bool base64encode, bool compress, bool withUniqueId, string filename, int maxSize)
{
	return string.Empty;
}

You’ll learn very early in your programming class that you can call a function by supplying the arguments in exactly the same order as they are listed in the method signature. Here’s an example:

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Combinable enumerations in C# .NET

November 8, 2016 Leave a comment

You’ve probably encountered cases with combined enum values using the pipe character, i.e. the “bitwise or” operator ‘|’:

Size.Large | Size.ExtraLarge

Let’s see an example of how to create such an enum.

The enumeration is decorated with the Flags attribute like in the following example:

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An example of grouping and joining collections in .NET: calculate total scores by student and subject

November 7, 2016 Leave a comment

Imagine that we have two collections. First we have a student collection with IDs and names. Then we also have a collection that holds the scores the students got in various subjects on several occasions. This latter collection also holds a reference to a student by the student ID. The goal is to join the two collections and calculate the total score of each student by subject.

There are various ways to solve this problem. The goal of this post is to show an example of using the LINQ GroupBy and GroupJoin operators to build an object with the information we need.

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